THE TOWN FOP.
p. 15 Mrs. Celinda Dresswell. Dresswell was obviously the original name of Friendlove, and Mrs. Behn forgot to alter her MS. at this passage. The same oversight occurs later in the act when Bellmour says ’. must rely on Dresswell’s friendship,’ (p. 20).
p. 18 Glass Coach. Coaches with glasses were a recent invention and very fashionable amongst the courtiers and ladies of the Restoration. De Grammont tells in his Memoirs how he presented a French calash with glasses to the King, and how, after the Queen and the Duchess of York, had publicly appeared in it, a battle royal took place between Lady Castlemaine and Miss Stewart as to which of the two should first be seen therein on a fine day in Hyde Park. The Ultimum Vale of John Carleton (4to, 1663) says, ‘I could wish her coach … made of the new fashion, with glass, very stately, … was come for me.’
p. 20 Tom Dove. A well-known bear so named and exhibited at the Bear Garden. Besides this passage there are four other allusions to him to be found. Dryden’s Epilogue to the King and Queen at the Union of the Two Companies, 1682, has:—
Then for your lacquies …
They roar so loud, you’d think behind the stairs,
Tom Dove, and all the brotherhood of bears.
His prologue to Vanbrugh’s alteration of The Pilgrim (1700) begins:—
How wretched is the fate of those who write!
Brought muzzled to the stage, for fear they bite;
Where, like Tom Dove, they stand the common foe.
In Southerne’s The Maid’s Last Prayer (1693) Act ii, II, Granger on receiving an invitation to dinner cries: ‘Zounds! a man had as good be ty’d to a stake and baited like Tom Dove on Easter Monday as be the necessary appurtenance of a great man’s table!’ D’Urfey in the epilogue (spoken by Verbruggen) to Robert Gould’s The Rival Sisters; or, The Violence of Love, produced at Drury Lane in 1696, writes:—
When the dull Crowd, unskilled in these Affairs,
To day wou’d laugh with us, to morrow with the Bears:
Careless which Pastime did most Witty prove,
Or who pleas’d best, Tom Poet, or Tom Dove.
Tom Dove has been wrongly described as ‘a bearward.’
p. 22 Southampton House. Southampton House, Bloomsbury, occupied the whole of the north side of the present Bloomsbury Square. It had ‘a curious garden behind, which lieth open to the fields,’—Strype. A great rendezvous for duellists, cf. Epilogue to Mountfort’s Greenwich Park (Drury Lane, 1691) spoken by Mrs. Mountfort:—
If you’re displeased with what you’ve seen to-night
Behind Southampton House we’ll do you right;
Who is’t dares draw ‘gainst me and Mrs. Knight?
p. 39 Nickers. Vide note (p. 456) Vol. I, p. 398, The Roundheads.
p. 41 Courant. A quick, lively dance frequently referred to in old dramatists.
p. 43 A Jigg. There were, in Post-Restoration times, two interpretations of the word Jig. Commonly speaking it was taken to mean exactly what it would now, a simple dance. Nell Gwynne and Moll Davis were noted for the dancing of Jigs. cf. Epilogue to Buckingham’s The Chances (1682):—
The Author dreads the strut and meen
Of new prais’d Poets, having often seen
Some of his Fellows, who have writ before,
When Nel has danc’d her Jig, steal to the Door,
Hear the Pit clap, and with conceit of that
Swell, and believe themselves the Lord knows what.
Thus at the end of Lacy’s The Old Troop (31 July, 1668), we have ‘a dance of two hobby horses in armour, and a Jig.’ Also shortly before the epilogue in Shadwell’s The Sullen Lovers (1668) we read, ‘Enter a Boy in the habit of Pugenello and traverses the stage, takes his chair and sits down, then dances a Jig.’
But it must be remembered that beside the common meaning there was a gloss upon the word derived from Elizabethan stage practice. In the prologue to The Fair Maid of the Inn (licensed 1626), good plays are spoken of as often scurvily treated, whilst
A Jigge shall be clapt at, and every rhime
Prais’d and applauded by a clam’rous chyme.
The Pre-Restoration Jig was little other indeed than a ballad opera in embryo lasting about twenty-five minutes and given as an after-piece. It was a rhymed farce in which the dialogue was sung or chanted by the characters to popular ballad tunes. But after the Restoration the Jig assumed a new and more serious complexion, and came eventually to be dovetailed with the play itself, instead of being given at the fag end of the entertainment. Mr. W.J. Lawrence, the well-known theatrical authority to whom I owe much valuable information contained in this note, would (doubtless correctly) attribute the innovation to Stapylton and Edward Howard, both of whom dealt pretty freely in these Jigs. Stapylton has in Act v of The Slighted Maid (1663) a ‘Song in Dialogue’ between Aurora and Phoebus with a chorus of Cyclops, which met with some terrible parody in The Rehearsal (cf. the present editor’s edition of The Rehearsal, p. 145). Indeed all extrinsic songs in dialogue, however serious the theme, were considered ‘Jigs’. A striking example would be the Song of the Spirits in Dryden’s Tyrannic Love, Act iv.
In Post-Restoration days a ballad sung in the streets by two persons was frequently called a Jig, presumably because it was a ‘song in dialogue’. Numerous examples are to be found amongst the Roxburgh Ballads.
The Jig introduced in Sir Timothy Tawdrey would seem to have been the simple dance although not improbably an epithalamium was also sung.
p. 44 an Entry. A dance which derived its name from being performed at that point in a masque when new actors appeared. In Crowne’s The Country Wit (1675) Act iii, I, there is a rather stupid play on this sense of the word confounded with its meaning ‘a hall or lobby’.
p. 63 Cracking. Prostitution. A rare substantive, although ‘Crack’, whence it is derived, was common, cf. p. 93 and note.
p. 65 Cater-tray. cater = quatre. The numbers four and three on dice or cards. This term was used generally as a cant name for dice; often for cogged or loaded dice.
p. 69 She cries Whore first. In allusion to the old proverb—cf. The Feign’d Courtezans, Act v, iv, Vol. II, p. 409, when Mr. Tickletext on his discovery appeals to the same saw.
p. 81 Berjere. A very favourite word with Mrs. Behn. Vide Vol. II, note (p. 346, The hour of the Berjere), p. 441 The Feigned Courtezans.
p. 93 Cracks. Whores. As early as 1678 ‘Crack’ is the proper name of a whore in Tunbridge Wells, an anonymous comedy played at the Duke’s House, cf. D’Urfey, Madam Fickle (1682), Act v, ii, when Flaile says: ’.’have killed a Mon yonder, He that you quarrell’d with about your Crack there.’ Farquhar, Love and a Bottle (1698), Act v, ii, has: ‘You imagine I have got your whore, cousin, your crack.’ Grose, Dict. Vulgar Tongue, gives the word, and it is also explained by the Lexicon Balatronicum (1811). It was, in fact, in common use for over an hundred years.
p. 94 Mr. E.R. i.e. Edward Ravenscroft.